from "Untitled: Red over Black, blue, Orange"

by Vanessa Place

Beauty is a verb. Beauty, like history, is the movement of time through space and space through time; beauty, unlike history, is the movement set to music. The deepest music, the music that resists hearing, but whose register runs river-thick in the atomistic soul and bubbles over all appearance. Beauty is resistance, the trapped tension between form and unform, space and figure, speech and silence, approach and retreat. Beauty will play itself in inversions of its occurrence: the painting, which occurs over the course of one or more planes, inherently favors space over time: the beautiful painting approaches time while retreating from space: this temporal confrontation cannot help but compound the space within which the confrontation takes place. Something that “takes place,” takes place in both space and time, and space and time are perceived as a singularity: now/here is the only fully imagined reality: the poem, which occurs over the course of time, approaches space to prove, like the mind, that time past and time future are time present: hurry up please it’s time. The approach/retreat is a singular, verbal event: beauty.